I nodded. I could use a beer.
‘You know, there was a family arrived here a few months ago, from Ceylon. She’d never been much further than a paddy-field, up-country somewhere. He was an agricultural specialist. They put the lot of them in the Plaza building, up the road, up thirty floors. Well, after a month or so being locked up in the clouds, the wife tried to take herself and her two children back home — out of the window of the apartment. Defenestration. Funny word. You’d think it had something to do with sex. Landed on East River Drive in the middle of the rush hour. Cultural shock. Awful tragedy.’
I nodded again. I could use a second beer already. We walked towards the first of the three lift banks, each of which served a third of the building. We were on the top third, the 22nd to the 38th floors.
‘What about here?’ I asked. ‘Do you have much trouble with that sort of thing — defenestration?’
‘Well, they have the trouble. We just pick up the bits afterwards in a red blanket. But, now and again. Yes, it happens. And more often than it should. There’s a lot of subdued temperament around here It’s the nature of the business.’
‘How do they get out? None of the windows open, I notice They’re all sealed.’
‘Ah, but the Directors — the D1s and 2s — they have keys.’
‘So it’s only the senior staff that do themselves in? I’d have thought they might be the least frustrated.’
‘You have a point there. I hadn’t thought of that. Well, maybe it’s the guilt that sends the directors tumbling. That would fit. It has to be one or the other, doesn’t it? Either you tell yourself you’ve got to go, the bad faith becomes unsupportable, or else it’s just plain madness — disorientation: not knowing who you are, what you’re doing, or why. There’s quite a bit of both about here. Especially the compass spinning round like a top bit. You’ll see. Takes most people quite a while to find their feet here — their “role” as they like to call it. And some never do, my god. They head straight for the rocks.’
We got off at the third-floor staff concourse, just next the main staff cafeteria, the news and candy stand and the shoe-shine man. Wheel immediately decided on an appointment with this fellow and I waited behind him while he put his boots up.
People streamed round us, queueing up for early lunch. There was a strong smell of some foreign gravy and a warm blast of scented air from secret whirring machinery. To our left at the end of a long corridor a barber’s shop advertised itself discreetly; to our right, at an equally discreet distance, was the New York Chemical Bank with a train of grave people fiddling with their wallets making their way politely to and fro; the whole area was remarkably like the first-class passenger concourse of a big tin liner, moored disconsolately and permanently beyond territorial waters, going nowhere.
Only the shoe-shine man seemed real — a middle-aged, balding New Yorker in a short-sleeved tartan shirt, bent permanently forward on a little wooden chair over his work, head bobbing furiously, his hands and forearms a dusty brown with the years of his trade. He was like a stowaway on this listless ship full of impeccable people, someone from a ghetto who had shinned up the anchor drain on our last night in port and had now been set to work his passage by the captain.
The two men exchanged scattered, staccato pleasantries for awhile, then fell silent. The sun swept off the East River through a huge glass window baking us all, exotic but tasteless cakes in a perfumed oven
Then the shoe-shine man started to hum and sing in an abrupt and inexact high tenor: some pop song from years before.
Winchester Ca-thed-draall …
… hum dum de de dum …
As my ba-by left town …
When he was finished he suddenly thumped the shoe box with his palm: ‘Next please. Step right up.’
‘Tap, tap, tap’ — the man went now, using both hands on the box. ‘Tappety, tap; tappety, tap, tap, tap,’ as though beginning something stylish on drums or sending a morse message.
I suddenly thought I felt the first intimations of Wheel’s warning cultural shock, the compass spinning madly. The sun seemed to rip through the glass, settling on all of us with the intensity of a flamethrower.
‘Tappety, tap, tap, tap …’
The building had swelled all morning with echoes, something straining behind all the appearances, an indecipherable message trying to get through — something trying desperately to be known, but which one could never quite get hold of. The music went on in the first-class saloon but there was a hole somewhere in the bottom of the boat.
‘Winchester Ca-thed-drall …’
The man had started up again, the inane tune cutting through the busy noise of the concourse in its high register, like a clue so obvious that no one notices it.
We passed through the double swing doors at the end of the concourse and the sounds were all suddenly turned out behind us like a light. The long corridor behind, which bordered the Security Council and other committee chambers, led to the Delegates’ North Lounge over a carpet so soft and dark that it turned its travellers into skiers on some small slope in the evening, gliding slowly homewards. Everyone cut their pace here, hovered like birds, the better to fall on the right man or group, exchanging diplomatic messages, before passing back to committee or on to the lounge.
This long dark ante-room was full of precisely intentioned messages; a slip of the tongue here could ruin the false consensus; you were sure of the man here before you opened your mouth; here were endless coincidental but contrived meetings. But who might approach me in this place with whispers, I wondered, linking arms over the deep carpet? And would the message be for Graham — or one that would not come at all, the messenger having seen me for the man I was, not Graham, but the figure Mrs Taufiq had partly resurrected earlier that morning. And if that happened — what could I expect? What penalty might they contrive for stealing their man’s identity? Mrs Taufiq had raised me up again, the man of Cairo and of Durham jail that I had thought well lost. If the place was full of echoes, I realised it was because I was listening now to everything with the ears of two people, Graham and myself, moving from person to person in unnerving stereophony.
There were more than a hundred or so delegates dotted about in groups and armchairs in the huge lounge at the end of the building but not more than half a dozen people standing at the bar down by the river end of the great football pitch. And the customers here all looked English or American — journalists, Wheel told me, UN correspondents for the most part, their backs firmly to the delegates, arms and elbows against the counter, pondering the bottles with all the wan humanity of drinkers. The bar didn’t belong to the room at all; it seemed to have been tipped into the plan as an afterthought, as discreet deference to the Anglo-American habit of drinking vertically and perhaps, even more obliquely, as a special acknowledgment to the latter’s major financial contribution to the running of the organisation.
When we got down to this distant fountain, Wheel put a finger into his collar and pulled. It was hotter in the lounge than anywhere else I’d been in the building. The sun, which had been cold outside, had here baked the huge room all morning through the thirty-foot windows that ran all along its length. Now, just after midday, it had gone above the building, leaving everything done to a turn.
The delegates, lightly inspired by this warmth and coffee, released a mild euphoria on the air like the end of an unimportant embargo. For once these devious men were obvious in their games over the glass field. In this huge privacy they no longer temporised, they lost their public timidity; here they could He unequivocally.